So much has been written about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) as the Great Soul (Maha Atma) that one wonders what new things can be said about this world historical figure.

For the British, accustomed to armed warfare the Mahatma’s methods were bewildering. They were far more comfortable in dealing with promoters of armed conflict such as the Punjabi revolutionaries Bhagat Singh and Sukh Dev or the Bengali warrior Subhas Chandra Bose. Each one of these was quickly despatched but Gandhi’s unorthodoxy was another story. The unstoppable force of truth (Satya Graha) was incomprehensible to the military mind, so was the concept of a fast unto death.

Whilst all of this is properly documented, the world knows precious little about the leading role which the Mahatma played towards the first modern Indian diaspora. The major reason for this neglect is understandably, the far-flung nature of that movement; from Fiji to Mauritius, to Natal in South Africa and to the Caribbean which itself is spread over a long archipelago. Then there is the problem of the long distance – in time and in space – between India and some of the diasporic settlements.

As is well-known, Gandhi went to South Africa in 1893 on the invitation of an Indian merchant who was conducting a civil suit there. He stayed there for the next 20 years during which he used the micro-society of South Africa as an experimental ground for the macro-society of South Asia. It was in Natal, the province where most Indians worked, that Gandhi developed his most effective methods of peaceful political agitation namely, Ahimsa, Satya graha, hartal (strike), ghirau (strikers surrounding a compound) and khadi (spinning one’s own cloth).

Between 1913 and 1917, the anti-indentureship campaign moved centre-stage for the first time; it was now included among the other all-India concerns which constituted the Swaraj (freedom) movement. The Indian National Congress (INC) as the major vehicle of change, passed strong resolutions at each of its annual conferences in 1913, 1914, 1915 and 1916 condemning the system and calling for its end. The 1915 Resolution, for example, passed at the Bombay Congress, urged abolition “as early as possible, the system being a form of slavery which socially and politically debases the labourers and is seriously detrimental to the economic and moral interests of the country.”

From this time onwards, the concerns of overseas Indians became regular items on the national agenda of the INC. From the very start of 1917 Gandhi increased the pressure. The 32nd Congress of the INC, held early in that year, warned that “nothing short of complete abolition of indentured labour, whether described as such or otherwise, can effectively meet the evils which have been admitted by all concerned to have done irreparable harm to the labourers.”

Gandhi then threatened mass civil disobedience whilst he organised the rural communities to chase the arkatias from their villages. Finally he promised a fast until death if the system was not repealed. The Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, pressed from all sides, announced the end of recruitment as of March 20, 1917. The last ship to bring girmityas to Trinidad, the SS Ganges arrived here on Sunday, April 22, 1917 bringing 421 emigrants, 71 more than the number allowed on a ship of that tonnage.

It must be borne in mind, however, that this national agitation just described, was not the only cause of abolition. There were various other causes such as the campaign of British-Indian capitalists (like the tea planters in Assam) who were constantly complaining that emigration was siphoning off their captive labour force. There were women’s groups in India which made heavy weather of the inadequacy of women in the plantation economies and the consequent social dislocations; others made much of the abuse of women by plantation officials, European and Indian. The British Administration cited the danger of German torpedoes during the First World War, the urgent need for over one million sepoys for the battlefields of France and Mesopotamia as well as the necessity for workers in war industries based in South Asia. All of these factors were relevant but the final push came between 1915 (the year of the Mahatma’s return) and 1917.

In the very year of the cessation of recruiting in India, an inter-departmental conference representing these vested interests was convened in London to devise a system of softer bonded labour for the colonies. Whilst the Indian Administration was properly represented, the Imperial power made the fatal mistake of not including Gandhi in the deliberations. The report of that committee, the Islington Report, was ready by July 1917.

Mahatma Gandhi rejected the report totally. The main point, he said was that “the conference sat designedly to consider a scheme of emigration not in the interests of the labourer but in those of the colonial employer.” Indian labour needed no outlet and the new scheme devised by the Interdepartmental committee was “a new system of indentureship.” All India Congress passed a resolution at its Calcutta meeting in 1917 endorsing this view. By the end of 1918 it had become abundantly clear that the Islington scheme was totally unacceptable in India.

Guyana ended all indentureship in December 1919. Fiji freed her Indians in January 1920 and in Trinidad and the other Caribbean colonies, the trade was never resumed after its war-time stoppage. The last indentured Indian in Trinidad became free in April 1922, in which year the Government of India passed the Indian Act VII of 1922 whereby the emigration of unskilled workers was forbidden except when approved by both chambers of the Indian legislature and authorised by the Governor-General in Council.

In 1919 a five-man delegation from British Guiana, including three very prominent Indo-Guyanese leaders, visited India to convince leaders there of the advantages of a renewed “Colonisation Scheme.” After much strenuous effort the group was able to track Gandhi to the 1920 Amristar conference of the INC but their entreaties did not bear much fruit.

But the Empire was not to be deterred in its insistence on the renewal of Indian emigration to the Caribbean. In 1922 the Government of India sent the Deputy President of the Madras Legislative Assembly, Dewan Bahadur Kesava Pillay to British Guiana to sound out the prospects for renewed Indian emigration to that colony. Again in 1925 Kunwar Maharaj Singh a senior member of the Indian Civil Service was sent from India on a similar mission. In the interim, a second Guyanese delegation was sent to India in 1923/24 to persuade Gandhi and other influential officials and unofficials that the plantations of Demerara was an ideal haven for unemployed Indians. Gandhi responded to all these pressures by sending C.F. Andrews in May 1929 to the Caribbean.

Andrews was also no stranger to Trinidad. The East Indian Weekly had prepared its readers for the visit by informing them of Gandhi’s high regard for Andrews. Although Andrews did not arrive in Trinidad until July 1929, preparations were being made for the ‘Reverend Sadhoo’ in Trinidad as early as March 1929.

During these visits, he travelled extensively in both colonies, met hundreds of people of all races, preached in Christian schools and churches and lectured (in Hindi) at Hindu and Muslim religious spaces. This author has been able to interview two persons at whose homes Andrews stayed during his Trinidad visit. Both these persons corroborate the newspaper reports regarding Andrews’ fluency in Hindi, his adoption of Indian dress and his vast knowledge of the Indian diaspora. However, the main purpose of his mission was to make recommendations regarding the colonisation scheme; this was clearly stated by Andrews upon his arrival in Georgetown. Local planter interests as well as some Indo-Guyanese leaders pressed him to support the colonisation scheme.

During his Caribbean tour, Andrews was discrete enough to avoid making categorical statements in support of or against the scheme. Yet his remarks made at public meetings, and in other written comments leave no doubt that he did not support it. In Georgetown, for example, he pointed out that instead of bringing new immigrants from India and repatriating those who had served their time in the colonies, money should be spent ‘in preserving the lives of those who are already in the colony’ especially the babies who seemed to specially need such facilities. In Trinidad he spoke of the low wages paid to East Indian labourers who ‘have a hard daily battle to fight against poverty and disease’:

I have seen waterlogged districts where the agricultural worker had to go through mud and water all the way for a distance of nearly five miles, simply because no road or track was provided for him by the authorities.

Long after the departure of C.F. Andrews, the Mahatma’s work continued to be highlighted on this side of the water. The final Gandhi sponsored visit to the Caribbean was in 1941–1942 when he sent Dr. Durai Pai Pandia to give advice and temporary leadership to the East Indians in Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana. Pandia spent four months in Trinidad from December 1941 immediately after his Jamaica visit and before the Guyanese tour. A lawyer by profession, Pandia had served as consultant to a group of South Indian states at the London round-table conference in 1932. Shortly afterwards he became private secretary to Gandhi.

In the souvenir produced to commemorate this visit there was a cable from Gandhi wishing a successful tour as well as a message from Nehru who noted that apart from Gandhi, very few other nationalist leaders had had close contact with Indians overseas. Pandia gave a series of lectures and made representation on a number of matters such as a night shelter for destitute Indians and a collection fund for a social club to be established for the Indo-Trinidadian community. Above all, he gave hope to a people by constantly telling them of their ancestry, the struggle in India and the need for them to be properly organised.

Our discussion of the work of C.F. Andrews brings into perspective another of the Mahatma’s pressing concerns. This was the sad plight of many of the returnees from the colonies. As a general guide we can say that approximately 25 percent of the 1.4 million girmityas returned to India. As late as 1954 some 335 returned to India in the Resurgent as the last group of repatriates from Guyana.

But for just over a century before that 1954 departure, there were thousands who were returning from all of the colonies of indenture. For the majority of these returnees the homecoming was anything but welcoming. They had great difficulty in reintegrating into Indian society for a number of reasons. They had lost caste by crossing the kala pani and were therefore prevented from participating in domestic or village life; many were old and unemployable and therefore a burden on relatives; many had become addicted to the Caribbean’s favourite beverage, the product of their labour and were making nuisances of themselves with their new swagger; many were now eating beef, having told themselves that the Caribbean cow was not as holy as the Indian cow. Many caused consternation in their villages by rushing forward to shake hands instead of the graceful namaste greeting with clasped palms. One returned Guyanese boxer took his craft so seriously that he was damaging his less aggressive Indian compatriots and was therefore banned from further fighting. Many of them could not find their original villages in East Bengal because floods had washed away dozens of villages over the years or housing developments had obliterated the original settlement.

The result of all of their misfortunes was the gathering of these misfits in a Calcutta slum called Matiaburz. Here the returnees gathered a strange mixture of people from Trinidad and Jamaica, Fiji and Mauritius, Natal and Guadeloupe. Up to 1917 they would assemble each day at the coolie depot in Calcutta begging to be reindentured. Most of them, however, could meet the required criteria. After 1917 of course, this avenue was permanently blocked. The majority who remained formed a destitute hand of porters, factory workers and vagrants caught up between two worlds. It was Gandhi aided by C.F. Andrews and other voluntary associations like the Marwani Sevak Sangh who ventured into the dens of Matiaburz offering skills training, housing assistance, the establishment of schools and daramshalas (houses of refuge) to these displaced people. Because of the Mahatma’s political weight he was able to effect substantial infrastructural, relief and to uplift the spirit of the returnees. In these ways many returned Caribbean persons benefited from the Mahatma’s ministering, right up to the 1940s.

During Gandhi’s lifetime and long after his death in 1948 he remained and has continued to remain a continuous source of guidance and inspiration to Caribbean and other new world peoples. In 1931 for example Trinidad’s East Indian Weekly triumphantly reported that Gandhi was addressing the world from England and in January 1932, the same paper noted with pride, that Adrian Cola Rienzi, then a law student, had met the Mahatma.

In 1938 the descendants of the original labourers who had arrived on the Hesperus and Whitby in May of 1838, were delighted when at Gandhi’s urging, the INC passed a resolution expressing solidarity with the Indo-Guyanese population as they commemorated the first century of their arrival in that colony.

In 1947, the then rising star of Guyanese politics Cheddi Jagan (1918–1997) urged his striking workers to stand firm by reminding them that “Mahatma Gandhi gave everything he had to see India get her independence. It did not take him a day or two but years.” In the area of sevak (charitable work) the Gandhi Sevak Sangh was founded in Trinidad in 1948 and in 1952 this Sangh was able to erect a statue of the Mahatma in San Fernando and to establish branches in Guyana and Suriname. It also established the Gandhi Ashram as a religio-cultural centre in San Fernando. There is of course another statue in Port-of-Spain and countless Indo-Caribbean children have been named Mohandas or Karamchand which were his other names.

The assassination of Gandhi on January 30, 1948 was a most dramatic event for Indo-Caribbean people. His name had become a household label from Jamaica in the north to the Guyanas in the south. For the whole of the month of February this story was prominently featured throughout the region. Non-Indian publications like the Trinidad Guardian and Guyana’s Daily Argosy and Daily Chronicle sold heavily during this immediate post-Gandhi period.

On the Monday after the shooting The Guardian carried a banner headline “Colony-wide mourning for Gandhi continues.” Condolence meetings were held throughout the colony in which people of “all races and creeds” spoke of the Mahatma as an exemplar. Such meetings were held in Port-of-Spain, Aranguez, Curepe, Cunupia, Chaguanas, San Fernando, Couva and Carapichaima. During the months afterwards Caribbean newspapers carried commentaries from leading newspapers in India and Britain.

As Nelson Mandela has reminded us, the Mahatma conceded the necessity of armed struggle in certain situations. Mandela quotes Gandhi: “Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence…I prefer to use arms in defence of honour than remain the vile witness of dishonour.” Mandela used this Gandhian dictum to guide his own struggle.

The Mahatma’s Caribbean concerns contributed significantly to the ending of indentureship, the end of the various attempts to re-impose a system of servitude and to the resuscitation of a depressed lot of returnees to India. He created new hope among a displaced, traumatised people and was therefore instrumental in the diasporas’ reconstruction after the deconstruction caused by their transportation from India and the rigours of plantation life. Diasporic Indians understood this and therefore made him their own Mahatma.